Center Initiatives
DF/HCC Strategic Initiatives
Technology Innovation Fund (TIF)
Technology Innovation Fund (TIF)
DF/HCC aims to build a fund to support the efforts of Harvard faculty members interested in creating new translational technologies that can facilitate the application of cancer science to the treatment of patients and prevention of the disease in healthy individuals.
The DF/HCC Technology Innovation Fund (TIF) will make it possible for Harvard investigators with especially promising ideas for creating technology that will enrich clinical cancer research to test their ideas. TIF will fund the earliest stage of technology development, i.e., the steps between the emergence of a potentially valuable new idea and the proof that the idea is valid.
It has been exceedingly difficult to fund the proof-of-principle stage for emerging technology from currently available funding resources. Because of this difficulty, new technologies to enrich and speed the process of clinical cancer research have not appeared as quickly as they could have. TIF is a new means of dealing with this problem.
Projects funded in 2005 include:
- Development of a Novel Biosensor Technology for Cancer Research and Diagnosis, PI: Dale Larson (HMS). Scientific aim: To demonstrate the ability of surface plasmon enhanced illumination (SPEI), a newly developed biosensor technology based on photonics technology invented in this lab , to provide a research and diagnostic tool that will have a broad impact on the cancer field.
- Molecular Near Infrared Colonoscopy: From Bench to Bedside, PI: Umar Mahmood, MD, PhD (MGH). Scientific aim: To advance novel imaging technology developed at the Center for Molecular Imaging Research (CMIR), Massachusetts General Hospital, to help speed translation of findings into clinical practice. Specifically, the potential exists to improve patient care by increasing the number of colonic adenomas found and by allowing initial in situ characterization of these lesions.
- Highly Improved Detection of Tumor Biomarkers in Human Plasma, PI: G. Mike Makrigiorgos, PhD (DFCI). Scientific aim: To demonstrate that newly developed genome amplification technologies lead to improved sensitivity in detecting circulating nucleic acids of tumor origin in the plasma of cancer patients. In particular, they have developed a new technology, restriction and circularization-aided rolling circle amplification (RCA-RCA), that allows comprehensive whole-genome amplification from DNA that has undergone fragmentation. As such, it can amplify fragmented nucleic acids circulating in human plasma, including tumor-derived DNA that is used as a biomarker for early tumor detection and disease-monitoring in cancer. The technology can be applied for any type of cancer; this particular application focuses on colon cancer.
